On 08Jul2020 0845, Kelly St. Clair wrote:
> On 7/7/2020 8:37 AM, Thomas RUX wrote:
>> Howdy Alex,
>>
>> CT Alien Module 6 Solomani
>> p. 4:
>> UNSCA asteroid belt station discovered the jump drive in 2087 (p. 12
>> Imperial -2431).
>>
>> "The range of the jump-1 drives first developed by UNSCA was
>> insufficient to reach the nearest star - Alpha Centauri. It took
>> several years before a US Space Force (USPF) team based on Luna tried
>> a mission which, in several trips, established an intermediate
>> stopover and refuelling point about 1 parsec out. For various
>> scientific reasons, the mission was to Barnard's Star instead of
>> Alpha Centauri. They set out in 2096 (p. 12 Imperial -2422) and came
>> back a year later..."
>
> There is, of course, a persistent rumor both OOC and most likely IC
> that the "various scientific reasons" involved DEEPLY classified
> ("burn BEFORE reading") observations that /something/ strange was
> going on at Barnard's.  Consider how good we've gotten at remote
> imaging, and project that forward another half century...

A few decent sized ore freighters jumping into and out of system every
month or so would probably be detectable as a gravity wave, if nothing
else. As the Vilani had been at Barnard mining stuff for some time,
there'd be a nice long record of little gravity waves and possibly of
visible jump flashes.

Something just occurred to me - it's been written that the Vilani held
onto jump-2 tech pretty tightly, so as to retain an mobility advantage
over client races and barbarians. However, Terra must've gotten jump-2
very quickly, because there's no other sane way to move around the area
of space that they did. Either that or they used deep space jumping
routinely and nobody ever thought to mention this (and if they did, it
changes a lot of strategic considerations that are considered major in
canon).

--
Rupert Boleyn <xxxxxx@gmail.com>